c. To feel and
understand it you must be born a musician, and you know well enough
that these gentlemen who are paid to sing in the choir know nothing
about music. When I see you, Gabriel, smiling at religious things,
I guess by your manner how much you conceal, and I am sure you are
right. I was interested to know the history of music in the Church.
I have followed step by step the long Calvary of this unhappy art,
carrying the cross of worship uphill through the long centuries. You
have heard people often talk of religious music, as if it were a thing
apart, believed in by the Church; but it is all a lie, for religious
music does not exist."

The Perrero had moved off when he heard that the Chapel-master, whose
loquacity was indefatigable when he spoke of his art, had started on
the theme of music. He had formed his own opinion of Don Luis and told
it to everyone in the upper cloister. He was a simpleton who only knew
how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking
of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to
which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.

The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking
the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at
the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing
of the high altar praying aloud. The early twilight of the winter
evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats
were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.

"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in
the Church everything is anarchy. I believe there is a great deal to
be said for the unity of the Catholic worship throughout the world.
When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not
invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner
of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that
would shock our ears if we heard it now. Out of Palestine, and where
there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose,
Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the
popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly
to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to
mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in
their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their
name would seem to